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Tiny torro

18 August 2001

A team of scientists have made a minature sculpture of a bull, no bigger
than a red blood cell. Satoshi Kawata and his colleagues at Osaka University in Japan
made the 3D “microbull” from resin, using two laser beams to trace its outline
to within an unprecedented accuracy of about 150 nanometres (Nature,
vol 412, p 697). The resin solidifies only at the focal point of the lasers. The
tiny sculpture shows that improvements in this technique could produce devices
such as microscopic machines that could diagnose and treat disease as they swim
through the bloodstream.